Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is. Will Self More Quotes by Will Self More Quotes From Will Self In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope for. Will Self amusementhollywoodage If we bought everything on the Internet, our eyes and mouths and nostrils would probably begin to film over with a tegument - one initially tissue-thin and capable of being removed each morning, but which gradually thickened and hardened until we were imprisoned in our own tiny minds. Will Self eyemindmorning Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he. Will Self crowdsstrangecomfort I'm very happy for whatever plaudits might come the way of my work, but I never ever sit down to write x with y in view - whether it's a reader, a prize or a sale. Will Self viewswritingmight I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at least look at the face in the hijab - and try to imagine the one beneath the niqab - before you depersonalise its wearer. Will Self islamwritingtrying I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom. Will Self shininglittlesthinking Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak. Will Self folkslisteningenemy Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. Will Self raceageclass Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. Will Self notebookmean As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence. Will Self machinesbuildingsports ...catching a glimpse of his rather hippyish form in a mirror, he wonders at this atavism of apparel, is it an inversion of foetal ontogeny, in which the phenotype passes through previous fashion stages? Soon there will be gaiters and gloves...I will probably die, he thinks, clad in animal skins. Will Self fashionanimalthinking Well, I wanted to be a philosopher, which is the idlest occupation in the world. I wanted to be involved in abstract thought, but because of various problems with the authorities I wasn't able to pull that one off. A lifetime of idleness in academia would have really suited me. So I was thrown out, as it were. Other than that, there seemed no possible idle occupations, so writing . . . although writing isn't exactly idleness. There's an enormous tension between indolence and languor. Will Self creativitywritingphilosophy The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile. Will Self writingpeoplethinking What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo! Will Self smartphonesdumbanimal If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus. Will Self seventieseightyifs Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to do in life. Will Self epilepticsconvictionlust I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living. Will Self fantasy-lifebathroomfantasy I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book. Will Self down-andcomputerbook I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me. Will Self wakingwritingfirsts I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that. Will Self drivenwritingfeels
